World-famous physicist Stephen Hawking will be coming to Canada for a visit this year, but he has denied reports that he's mulling over a permanent move here.

World-famous physicist Stephen Hawking will be coming to Canada for a visit this year, but he has denied reports that he's mulling over a permanent move here.

The Daily Telegraph reported Tuesday that Hawking was mulling over an invitation to work at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo.

There is "no truth to the story," a spokesperson for the University of Cambridge in England told the Toronto Star yesterday.

Hawking declined comment but approved a statement released by the university.

"Stephen Hawking has no plans to leave the University of Cambridge," Peter Haynes, head of the department where Hawking does his work, said in the statement.

"Stephen has made an enormously important contribution to the university over the last 40 years, both as a scientific leader in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and, more generally, as an inspirational communicator of science and mathematics to the wider public."

Earlier reports out of Britain suggested Hawking, who has Gehrig's disease, was considering an invitation to come work at Perimeter by his Cambridge colleague, Neil Turok, the mathematical physicist who will take over as the Waterloo institute's executive director on Oct. 1.

The Perimeter Institute – which its website says "is dedicated to addressing foundational issues in current theoretical physics research" – confirmed it has made a standing offer to Hawking for a visit.

Last month, Hawking criticized the merging of two British funding bodies into a single Science and Technology Facilities Council.

In a letter to government ministers quoted in the British media, he said a "bookkeeping error" had caused a funding shortfall of about $160 million with "disastrous implications. There is a possibility that very severe cuts will be made in the grants awarded to U.K. research groups ... Cutting them will hurt young researchers and cause enormous damage both to British science and to our international reputation. They could well lead to several physics departments closing."

Turok is leaving Cambridge after failing to persuade university authorities, research councils and sponsors to spend the equivalent of $40 million to expand its Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, which he heads, into a grander operation named after Hawking.

By comparison, the Waterloo institute has about $300 million in past and present funding from public and private partners.

The addition of Hawking to Perimeter's staff of top physicists would be a major coup for the research institute, founded in 1999 by Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-CEO of Research In Motion, which makes the BlackBerry.

Perimeter's John Matlock, who referred to Hawking as a "sci-lebrity," noted that scientists from around the world descend on Waterloo each year, staying weeks or months to collaborate on research.

"It just happens to be in the populist culture that Stephen Hawking is well known, but we already have top pre-eminent physicists who visit here regularly – they're just not in the public consciousness.